The moon’s efforts made little difference amongst the brush at the base of the tall pines, and Blackhall’s greatcoat felt the pluck of many hidden briars as he pushed west.

He knew the men he followed were somewhere ahead, but dense forest and the desire for stealth had left him lagging. Still he crept on, experience having taught him patience.

As he moved he listened for a snatch of conversation on the wind and watched for the dancing shadows of a fire.

What little breeze stirred the stillness between the trees, ceased. Through the darkness came a noise – the rattle and clash of metal upon metal.

Blackhall, dropping all pretense of concealment, began to make his way north as rapidly as the entangling wilderness would allow.

His plunge was brought up short at a clearing, the moonlight finally reaching him unchecked. To the east was a house, small but well kept, and, at Blackhall’s estimate, some forty acres of plowed field beyond.

He had come upon the circular expanse at the southern most tip, but from his vantage point he could easily make out the white hoods of those he’d been hounding. Although he’d only noted two from his window, a dozen had gathered amongst the trees nearest the house. Most held pots and pans, and busied themselves rattling them together. At their center, their boldest member stepped forward, waving his gin bottle and shouting at the shuttered windows. The distance and ruckus prevented Blackhall from making out his words, but his agitation seemed genuine enough. What concerned him most, however, was the linen faced member who moved naught, but kept his musket close across his chest.

Frowning, Blackhall began to tread along the clearing’s edge, taking care not to reveal himself.

Two hundred yards from the gathering, he paused.

From amongst the clamor came something new – buried beneath the crickets and the mob, the sound of crying reached his ears. Pushing back his broad brimmed hat, he cocked his head, breathing in the humid air.

After a moment he crept forward in a duck walk, releasing his sabre from its scabbard.

With a slow hand he slid the point between the gnarled branches of a dense thicket, halting his advance as his hilt offered resistance.

He spoke:

“I apologize for interrupting in your time of distress, but I suspect you may be able to clarify a few things. If you’ll please join me amongst these shadows, I would have words with you.”

To Blackhall it seemed as if the bush were birthing, a boy crawling from its shadowed womb, the work of the scratching hands of the forest visible along his back, arms and legs. As the youth looked up, Thomas recognized the sandy hair, wide brow and small nose. He removed his coat, draping it about his companion’s bare shoulders. At closer range he could tell the boy was older than he’d first thought, yet still no more than one-and-twenty, with a child’s face and gawky limbs.

“Ah, you must be Constable Melbain’s errant brother?”

“Yes.”

“Your name then?”

“Mitchum.”

“Mitchum – we’ll briefly gloss the matter of your nude disposition, as expediency is likely best. Do you know why those men accost yonder house?”

“You are not with them then? It is a Charivari, sir. A warning to Mrs. Bigelow.”

In the distance the pot banging had moved from random chaos to a marching beat. The entire party was easily visible, now standing plainly away from the trees after finding courage in coordination.

Their center-man still led the slow advance, his rant unabated. Even at his distance, Thomas could see the damp circle of froth and spittle that had begun to form upon his linen guise.

“Your situation begins to explain itself. I have seen a few such rituals before, mostly amongst the French vineyards – I do not recall weapons or masks however. In fact, what I do recall is a lot of bawdy, out of tune singing, and copious local wine, all at the base of some red-faced couple’s window. It was often because an unpopular widow or widower had re-married before the end of mourning – has Arthur Bigelow been dead so short a time?”

“Arthur’s been in his grave nearly a decade. Patricia has been on this land for nigh fourty years, she practically raised this town, what right do they have to come slithering from the night to terrorize her?”

Thomas cleared his throat.

“Mitchum, I might guess by the daring of your attire, especially amongst so high a tide of mosquitoes, that they may have some dispute with your, uh, relationship with the widow Bigelow.”

The boy’s eyes hardened.

“Our business is ours, not my brother’s, nor the town’s.” He exhaled. “I must add, there is more than one motivation that might send an armed mob up from the village after Patty. Still, I am surprised that anyone would dare.”

“If you are here at the wildwood’s edge, where is Mrs. Bigelow precisely?”

“Well, we were taking a dip in the pond round back of the house when we heard the approach – she told me to git, and so I did. There’s a voice she has which’ll send you running to the trees without your clothes, and I was about where you found me when I could finally hear my brain over my pounding heart. My first thought was to run on for town and find Gareth, but it was my second that it was just as likely my brother was one of the intruders.”

As the boy talked, Blackhall’s eyes stayed upon the gathered throng.

The voice of the Ragmen ceased his raving, turning to the musket-bearer.

He pointed.

The man with the Brown Bess brought forth a white roll the size of a thumb, ripping at the end with his teeth.

Thomas stood, setting his sabre back at his belt and making a quick check of his Baker rifle’s breach.

“Come. Now.”

Making best efforts to stoop amongst the cover of the brush, he once again began to run.

He’d yet to cover half the distance before the gunman had primed and readied his weapon.

The thug lifted the long barrel, sighting the house through his hood’s ragged slits.

Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm. The audio and text formats of Flash Pulp are released under the Canadian Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.

At the point where the Kakibonga dripped into the Winipekw, Thomas Blackhall stumbled across the town of Bigelow.

The hamlet was little more than a line of houses scratched into the riverbank, its center point marked by a single spoke thrust into the woods.

After weeks of scrambling through dense brush, eating only deer jerky and hand-caught fish, Thomas was startled to find himself at the end of that spoke, the mouth of an immaculate roadway open before him.

He ran his fingers along the weeks of growth at his chin, eying the scene.

The road itself rolled gently away towards the shore. Along the water’s edge ran another road, and at this corner stood a house that had grown beyond its seams, boxy additions thrusting out in every direction, some of the extensions connecting onto extensions of their own. The walls of the rambling structure were a solid white, but the doors and window frames had been marked in the brightest of the rainbow’s palette.

From a green door in the rear, a mustached man exited, an axe cocked over his shoulder.

He began to walk towards Blackhall, humming.

“Come to raise a glass?” shouted the man, when he finally spotted Thomas. There was scorn in his voice.

“In truth, I didn’t know there was a glass nearby to be held, but if yonder sprawling castle is an Inn, I could certainly find my thirst.”

Blackhall had moved to close the distance, and now offered a more formal greeting.

“Thomas Blackhall,” he said.

“Morton Van Rijn,” the man replied, taking the offered hand. “Welcome to Bigelow. I apologize, I mistook you for Lefevre, one of the local farmers. He often aims to walk the road before drinking himself into blindness, he claims it keeps him from getting lost on his way home. His beard is nearly as wild as your own, I dare say. Anyhow, whatever the foul excuse, the more whom use the road, the happier I am.”

Blackhall noted the man’s discreet attempt at wiping his hand clean as he talked.

“Well, if I might find a basin and a scrap of mirror, I’d be happy to do away with the confusion,” he replied, tugging at his whiskers. “I’ve come from the Western District, and it’s been some time since I’ve had to worry on polite company.”

Van Rijn’s face brightened.

“You’re more than welcome to board at The Loyalist. If you’ll honour me with news from the South over dinner, I’ll be happy to give you a room free for the night. Your thirst is your own affair however – while I run the finest Inn in two hundred miles, I do not sell ardent spirits. My wife and I are the founders of the Bigelow Temperance Society, whose ranks include the majority of the members of Bigelow worth acquainting. The town itself houses three hundred, with the same number again of farmers who’ve settled the clearings in the surrounding area – of those some twenty-five are members of the Temperance Society, no small feat for a place largely made up of woodsmen and mosquito-bitten field tenders.”

Thomas nodded.

“Whiskey must be no small problem if it was deemed necessary to organize against it.”

“Yes, well, what I meant was, outside the ranks of The Society, in Bigelow polite company is as scarce a commodity as sobriety. Despite the population there are no less than three public houses – well, two proper public houses and Ginny Melbain’s parlour. There is no proper law however, as Constable Melbain has little interest in enforcing against his sister’s enterprise, and the drunks would not stand to have the law applied inequitably.”

“What of this road then? This doesn’t seem like the work of lackadaisical liqour hounds,” Blackhall asked, glancing in the direction of his promised bed and basin.

Van Rijn’s hands swung wide, the axe still firmly in his grip, his broad face breaking into a grin.

“This road was founded by Arthur Bigelow, who also gave his name to the town, as its first inhabitant. I have taken up his worthy task, knowing full well that the legislature will not step in to regulate the principality without ease of access, access I intend to provide with this highway. Each summer I have pushed the forest back further than Bigelow’s original cut, and each spring I salt the ground to prevent the brush from retaking my progress. I regret that my duties at The Loyalist have prevented me from making it my full time occupation, but it is my hope to one day bring the full might of The Society to bear on the problem.”

In Thomas’ minds-eye, a vision of twenty-five of Bigelow’s most upstanding citizens zoomed out to encompass the distance required to interlink with the nearest settlement of size. His legs ached. He eyed Van Rijn’s single axe.

“A worthy task, and if you’ll pardon my currently grizzled appearance, I’ll gladly take you up on that offer of dinner. Who might I speak to at the Inn about a room?”

* * *

The accommodations were cramped but comfortable. After bathing and scraping clean his face, Blackhall found himself suddenly coming awake to a sharp rapping at his door, scarcely aware that he’d set his head upon his pillow.

“Yes, coming,” he muttered, running his fingers through his mussed hair.

To Thomas, supper seemed a long time in arriving, although the gathered members of The Bigelow Temperance Society filled the period with much talk. In the end, every aspect of the meal was too dry for his liking, but he found himself pleasantly surprised at how quickly the plates were cleared and the gathering dispersed.

As he stepped onto the veranda that faced out upon the river, Blackhall began his ritual of pinching Virginian tobacco into one of the fine Spanish papers he carried. As he completed his task, a passerby who’d been strolling the water’s edge set a booted foot upon the entryway’s lowest step.

“Well, this is certainly the first gentleman I’ve ever come to encounter as a stranger on this porch, might I ask your name?”

“Thomas Blackhall.”

“Ah, then the name’s not been twisted amongst the gossip. I am Constable Gareth Melbain. Do you have business in town?” The lawman called up a wad of phlegm and deposited it on the wood planks at his feet.

“I thought I might wet my throat, little more,” replied Thomas.

“I wasn’t sure of your character, given your meal company. Still, it seems to me you’ve come a long way to nowhere for a drink. Mayhaps it is because you’ve heard of Ginny’s parlour, found in the blue-washed house at the end of this same street. She’ll likely give you a sample if you mention my referral.”

With that, the constable moved off the stairs.

“One last thing: do not take Van Rijn’s word on Bigelow as gospel. I knew Arthur, and he was a good man, whatever his wife may have become.” The man walked a step, and turned back to face the still silent Blackhall. “- and yes, I fully admit my younger brother ought know better.”

He strolled on.

By the time Blackhall had burned his fingers upon the smoldering stub of his cigarette, the weight of the food and the song of the river had lulled him to a rest. Deciding to forgo town politics, he instead retreated to the interior of the inn, and took to chasing after his interrupted slumber.

* * *

He was brought awake hours later by the sound of two mares whinnying outside his window.

Cracking the thin white curtains, he took in the scene.

Some twenty drunks had gathered at the edges of the town’s sole crossroads – some along his window, some across the way, along the graying timbers that he’d been told were the outer wall of Pullman’s General Store. Many of the bystanders held lanterns high as five men stumbled about in the center of the gathering.

Two of the men were busy harnessing blinders upon the spooked horses, while another pair fended off the increasingly animated protests of the muddy shirted fifth.

Through the pane of glass, Thomas’ ears could make out the back and forth of betting amongst those arrayed along his vantage point.

Satisfied with their results, the two men who’d been working the lashings stepped back, one of them giving the guardsmen instructions to clear the way – as the man shouted Blackhall recognized the face as that of Constable Melbain.

With no little force the brutes emptied the road of the pleading man, and without delay Melbain began a countdown from three, which ended with both animals receiving a sharp whip blow. The sudden pain sent the beasts hurtling up the salted path and into the darkness between the pines.

Laughing, the crowd began to stream along behind, leaving the corner once again silent.

His sleep disturbed, Thomas dressed and shuffled into the common room.

Pulling a book from the shelf adjacent the fireplace, he settled into a nearby rocking chair.

* * *

As the embers sank into ash, a chapter’s worth of the history of Canterbury had been enough to once again put him on a path to sleep.

He slipped into his room, taking a moment to peek between the lace to ensure a lack of further disruption.

Motion amongst the shadows of the store caught his eye.

Creeping from the darkness came the shape of a man, the moon illuminating the white pillowcase that was taut about his face. The mask was held fast with a thin rope at the neck, and to allow vision, two ragged black holes had been cut from the linen.

The man moved away down the forest road, but before Thomas might stray from the window, the meager light gave away a second ragman, the gin bottle in his hand catching the night sky’s reflection.

His stupor forgotten, Blackhall strode quickly about the room, collecting together his satchel. Pulling his greatcoat over the sabre he’d strapped to his hip, he snatched up his Baker rifle and shouldered the pack that once again contained the entirety of his possessions.

With a last look into the lane way – now empty – he exited his room and stepped from the green door at the rear of the building, the night insects roaring their greeting.

Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm. The audio and text formats of Flash Pulp are released under the Canadian Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.

McGillicuddy had been running The General Store since his father, Pop McGillicuddy, had fallen dead at the register.

Everyone in the area had agreed, in solemn tones, that it was how he would have wanted it. Privately, the junior McGillicuddy often wondered if the old man might have had a few more years if he hadn’t been surrounded by Hershey’s bars and beef jerky.

Still, his Mother had had him up on a stool hocking smokes before Pop’s socks were cold, and he’d remained behind the counter for the majority of the fifty-seven years since.

It was now a warm May Friday, and he was passing across a green pack of menthols while attempting to place the two couples who’d entered together.

“Out of towners? You look like one of the Merkel kids though – maybe one of Mary Merkel’s?” he asked the lamp-jawed twenty-one year old who’d stepped up to pay for his girlfriend’s habit.

“Yeah, Mom, er Mary Platt after she married Dad, but I guess Mary Merkel when you knew her, she actually died five years ago. Last week though, I get this call from the attorney who handles the estate, and he says that Granny Merkel also passed, leaving me the farm.” The boy held out a twenty. “I didn’t have much better to do this weekend, so I figured we’d drive out to see if it was worth selling.”

“Huh,” the old man said.

He’d long considered the people both the best and worst part of manning the counter in such a rural area. He often found himself gumming the day away with the same friends he’d had since grade-school, but, as the only gas for thirty miles, he just as often found himself dealing with the same handful of local miscreants week-after-week.

The Merkels were largely regarded as a bunch of ruffians, but he’d never had trouble with the old woman, who’d come in weekly to buy her lotto numbers.

“Your Gran was a good lady. Don’t remember much about your Ma, though I’m sorry to hear she’s gone.” He handed back some change.

The boy nodded, his short friend stepping up to the counter and laying down a five while shaking his bag of Ringolos.

When all debts were settled, the group cleared out, lamp-jawed Platt tossing McGillicuddy a wave.

As the bell above the door rang their exit, the old man took up his paper, returning to the tale of Nelson Miller’s prize catch.

* * *

When dusk began to settle on the horizon, McGillicuddy stepped out into the heat, broom in hand. In recent years he’d found it tougher to spot the candy wrappers and soda cans that built up along the edges of the small patch of pavement, so he’d taken to heading out a might earlier than his father had, to ensure a pristine lot.

The hum of motors in the distance brought him to a halt, his hands resting atop the worn handle.

A black SUV roared by, its horn blaring – seconds later a battered white van followed, the noise of its engine nearly blotted out by the music that flooded from its open windows.

McGillicuddy recognized the van, but couldn’t place it. Guessing the hooligans were off to Fiddler’s Tavern over in Barkley, he shook his head and reflected on a time when cars were unsafe enough that those sorts of problems resolved themselves.

He lifted the broom and began wrangling a large pile of Werther’s foils that Bill Johnson had likely turned out from his truck’s cup holder. Dumping the full dustpan into the nearby trash barrel, McGillicuddy recalled that Bill was just as careless with his childhood Hubba Bubba wrappers.

“It’s always the same miscreants,” he muttered.

* * *

He was counting the till when the lamp-jawed inheritor re-entered.

McGillicuddy was startled by the arrival; he hadn’t heard an engine pull up.

The boy had pushed the entrance open with great effort, staggering down the aisle with one hand sliding along the magazine shelf for support. His legs seemed to be causing him trouble, as if they were rapidly increasing in weight.

“Cuz-,” he said, collapsing sideways.

As he fell, his flailing arm caught a wire rack full of Doritos. A red, orange and green avalanche buried him on the floor.

McGillicuddy stood a moment.

The lump of snacks remained still.

The old man’s hand went to the phone, but a second interruption came slamming through the door.

It was the mousy girl that the Platt boy had been holding by the waist earlier in the day. She had none of her boyfriend’s lack of energy as she came running at the counter.

As she attempted to speak, her throat would allow only a series of soft clicks. Her face and shirt were soaked with tears and sweat.

She swallowed hard and once again opened her mouth to speak – a spray of vomit drenched the counter’s transparent scratch-ticket display instead.

McGillicuddy did hear an engine then, the store’s glass door gleaming with the approaching headlights.

His newest paralysis broken, the old man once again reached for the phone, but as he did so, he glanced out the window to size up his latest customer.

It was Cindy Merkel’s boy, he realized, finally placing the ratty white van. He hadn’t seen that delinquent much since Gran Merkel had passed, and Sheriff Blair had been forced to set Deputies Jelly and Cameron on putting him out of the old woman’s house.

The tall youth stepped down from the running board, and pulled a goat mask over his eyes.

McGillicuddy was hypnotized watching the streaker stride across the lot. A high pitched tone began to drift from the girl’s throat as a greasy hand pushed open the door. She began to scramble over her own half digested Big Mac and Coke, in an attempt to find safety.

The old man dropped the phone receiver, grabbing the girl’s arm and pulling her over the sick.

Goat-head, the Merkel kid, approached with an even stride, the axe head slick with scarlet liquid.

“Always the same miscreants,” McGillicuddy said, his father’s double-barrel clearing the counter.

Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm. The audio and text formats of Flash Pulp are released under the Canadian Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.

The Tercel was crowded at the best of times, a garage sale’s worth of randomness spread across the baby blue backseats. Smith and the girl had spent ten minutes in animated discussion at the brightly lit menu, but it was only once they’d reached the window itself that Mulligan realized the drink holders were already occupied by a pair of abandoned coffees.

As the highschool girl working the register watched on, passenger and driver both broke into a flurry of nervous activity – the PI craning to check the backseat’s cup holder, the woman attempting to roll down her window by hand in an effort to eject the old drinks. She was having difficulty however, and a giggle escaped her lips even as her frown deepened.

She switched hands, but she overcompensated, and another tug snapped the black and chrome crank at its base. The sound interrupted Mulligan, who’d been explaining that the window had long ceased to function properly.

His passenger started to cry then, dangling the wreckage from her calloused fingers.

Behind them the balding man in the white Buick SUV, aware only that his whopper was probably getting cold, hammered out two bleats of his horn.

The girl with the headset lifted the tray of drinks and thrust them into the car. Mulligan decided to simply leave the trash cups on the steel sill, accepted the large paper bag with rapidly blooming grease spots, and nosed the Tercel out of the drive-through lane, before halting between two yellow lines in the emptiest corner of the parking lot.

He reached out his arm, attempting to encircle the woman, but the gear shift began to dig into his hip. She didn’t seem to register his efforts anyhow, so he sank back, letting the engine idle.

The radio gurgled at a respectfully low tone.

As she regained her composure, her eyes wandered the dash. Mulligan, realizing he might finally be of some use, reached into the bag, pulling forth a sheaf of brown napkins.

The woman plucked the topmost from the pile, smearing tears and makeup into the blue and yellow logo.

As she snorted loudly, he gently pulled the crank from her hand, tossing it amongst the ruins on the rear bench. He also took a moment to rip the stapled receipt from the bag, partially tucking it under the pristine floor mat behind the passenger seat, surrounded by dozens of its cousins.

Her tears were easing, and she raised an eyebrow at him – even in her haste to enter the vehicle, she’d noticed the collection.

“For tax purposes. All my on-the-job receipts go in the pile, and once a year I clean out the car.”

She nodded, still dabbing at the corner of her eyes.

He reversed out of the lot then, drifting into the anonymity of late night traffic.

The woman spent the journey with her eyes fixed on her window, inspecting each passing car and pedestrian. The city slid by – offices, sidewalks, bus stops, apartment buildings, townhouses.

Eventually they found themselves maneuvering the twisted streets of a suburb.

The car finally came to a stop in front of a large two story house, its porch entrance set well back, a trim line of hedges providing privacy from the street. An array of stark white bulbs lit the grass like the noonday sun.

The woman stepped from the car, bending to gather her small cloth bag. She attempted to speak, but all that came out was “Thuk”.

Instead, she unthinkingly extended her right hand to Mulligan, who gently took it before she could realize and pull away.

After a long moment the heavy gray door that fronted the house swung open, a large woman with a precise haircut stepping out onto the porch and eying the pair as she lit a smoke.

Ellis flipped off the monitor and stood, his kneecaps popping, the office chair he’d been using wandering into a trajectory dangerous to the cat.

Mittens J. Nelson dodged the furniture, and after a reproachful glare at his inattentive master, padded from the room.

Rubbing an eye, Ellis began collecting up the detritus of his day – a stack of empty soda cans, half a plate of pasta left from supper, some McDonald’s wrappers from lunch. Tossing what he could, he slid through the apartment in the dark, bouncing off the recliner and entering the kitchen to deposit his dishes. There was a note on the counter.

“Hope your reports are finally done. (If they are, why aren’t you in bed with me already?) The coffee maker is set to go for the morning, I thought you might need it. Miss & love you, XOX, Monica.”

He smiled, flipped off the light, and again walked into the darkness, this time towards the bedroom.

“Love you,” she repeated, and he realized her words were likely echoing from some deep dream.

“Love you too,” he repeated, once again smiling.

“Murder you,” she said.

He told himself it was just part of the dream.

Still, he didn’t reply.

After a moment the room’s silence was broken only by the couple’s rhythmic breathing.

June 5th

To celebrate the closing of The Michigan Deal, Ellis and Monica had spent a night dancing. Ellis had resisted at first, he had a long standing anti-dance policy, but Monica insisted, and the cut of her new red dress sealed the deal.

It was late by the time they’d returned home, and slightly later by the time they’d re-mastered how to use their door key. Floating past the entry closet on a cloud of daiquiris, Monica shooed away Mittens J., who’d begun to entwine himself around her leg.

Fixing Ellis with a wicked eye, she released the bonds of her dress.

An hour later Ellis was at the fridge, looking for something to help down the advil he hoped would proof him against the pain of the coming morning. Mewling his discontent, the cat slammed its head into his ankle, extravagantly massaging his calf with its neck.

Grabbing the Meow Mix from the top of the fridge, he located the feline’s dish and filled it to the brim.

Having downed the Advil with two mouthfuls of milk straight from the container, Ellis made his way along the hall to the bedroom, gently weaving, occasionally lifting a hand to the wall to straighten his course.

Finally managing a controlled crash onto the bed, he leaned over Monica, planting an awkward kiss on her temple. Her first response was to continue her whistling snoring, but after a moment a thought seemed to swim into her mouth from the depths of her slumber.

“I’ll gut you like a rotting catfish,” she said.

There was a brief stretch of silence as her gentle wheeze continued.

He decided to sleep on the couch.

June 8th

“I’m sorry, really, I don’t know why I’d say those things, but you know I love you,” she said, taking a long sip of her iced tea.

They’d ordered twenty minutes previous, but the smiling girl in the black apron had yet to return with their plates of cheese cappelletti. Still, Ellis was glad that the patio area of Bistro-nauts had remained empty for most of their discussion.

“Listen, I know, I feel like an idiot for worrying about it, but you’d be pretty freaked out if every now and then, while coming to bed, I informed you I was going to shiv you in the dark.”

“Just wake me up next time OK? I thought you were sleeping on the couch because you were mad at me for something, you really had me worried.”

The smell of baked cheese drifted to the table, their server close behind.

June 12th

Monica had spent another breakfast apologizing, departing for work with a kiss and a naughty promise for atonement.

Ellis dragged his slippered feet to the couch, lifting his phone to call Bill at the office. It was the third day in a row he’d begged off with a feeble excuse, and Bill, with a chiding tone, suggested he use up some vacation time.

Ellis agreed.

Turning off the cell entirely, he curled up on the plush couch cushions and pulled the scratchy woolen blanket over his head, hoping to blot out the bright morning.

Fifteen minutes later he snorted awake, tossing off the blanket and coming suddenly to his feet.

In his dream Monica had been standing over him in the living room, a black handled fillet knife in hand, muttering: “gut you, cut you, gut you, cut you, gut, cut, gut, cut,” – the chant that now filled the reality of his nights.

June 15th

There was nowhere within the apartment to escape to, and nowhere he wanted to be without the shining Monica of daylight.

He held her even as she murmured.

He’d tried the couch, ear plugs, falling asleep to music – the unknown had only pushed slumber further away.

In the shadowed bedroom he could see no horizon, no time before this period of endless fatigue, and certainly no end to it.

He shook her awake.

“Er, what?” she asked, her puffy face coming off her pillow.

“You were talking again,” he replied, the relief of hearing reason from her mouth nearly bringing him to tears.

“Jesus, Ellis, it’s,” she fumbled for the clock. “4 am! I’ve actually got to work in the morning you know.”

She rolled over.

June 17th

For nearly an hour, Ellis stood at the foot of the bed, Mittens J. Nelson kneading at his socked feet.

Earlier he’d spent an eternity on the mattress, Monica’s slurred words building a ball of tension in his stomach that eventually choked his lungs and brought the taste of bile to the back of his throat.

So he’d gotten up to leave – but his now regular exodus had been halted by a snort and change in the tone of Monica’s sleep muttering.

He’d waited, inwardly pleading for quiet, and, for an instant, he’d held the salvation of silence.

He squeezed his traveling pillow as a child embraces a teddy bear.

There was a grunting snore, and the spell was broken. A croaking toad’s tone drifted from the bed:

Founded by a stay-at-home Mom, Little Wing produces a wide variety of hand crafted items – including cloth diapers, slings, and bibs – all made with a philosophy that minimizes mess and maximizes environmental friendliness.

It was late on Friday afternoon, and the warmth of the sun on Mulligan’s face had him longing for a nap.

“This doesn’t look much like a computer server room,” he said, shading his eyes and inspecting the view of the city through the sliding glass door. “Or, for that matter, a porn set.”

Mulligan had found the office in a re-purposed three bedroom condo on the ninth floor of a building whose interior was largely made up of mirrors, fake marble and senior citizens.

“We don’t have any servers on-site, we host internationally,” the bald man in the white and black button-down shirt replied. “This is our space to operate the front end, do design work, host meet and greets. You gotta love the view. All of our shoots happen offsite though, it’s more organic.”

“Bet you can meet and greet a lot of folks at once on a couch like that,” Mulligan replied, turning back to the former living room.

“Hey – we’re a respectable organization. My models are classy, in the pin-up tradition, none of that video with twenty pounds of rubber and a camera in their colon or anything.” The desk had been setup to dominate the room and Theo Melto, the bald man, spoke from deep within a heavy leather chair behind it.

“We?”

“Well, I’m the executive staff, I pay the talent and I write the checks for wardrobe – but I have five models working for me, and a tech monkey who looks after the servers, does the site design and such.”

Melto leaned forward, stroking his salt and pepper beard.

“You said you were a investigator. I figured you wanted to ask me about one of the ladies. Couple years ago I had a girl whose Dad sent a guy out from Ohio to come track her down after she’d run off. Fine. I’m a business man, I’m more than happy to help you out, but you’ve got to understand that I can’t give out the real names of the girls to just anyone – and there’s also the the expense of losing a valued employee to consider.”

Mulligan unthinkingly jiggled the clasp of his zipper and nodded throughout the man’s speech. As Melto finished, the PI dropped onto the champagne-coloured loveseat across from the desk.

“Are you aware that one of your models, Baroness Ludmilla Anastasia, AKA Joanie Melons, AKA Sensational Nancy Knickers, AKA Margaret Templeton, has multiple locations on her site in which she coaxes her members to send in pictures of their members?”

“Sure, all the girls’ sites have basically the same thing on ’em. Helps community building and makes the guys feel like they’ve got a connection to the girls. We usually send out a canned response about how hot it was, and print out the hilarious ones for the back of the design room.”

“At least one of those pictures has been linked to ongoing blackmail. Seems like terrible customer service for such a respectable organization.”

“What?” Melto’s lips tightened, his neck reddening. “Wait a minute while I get Nicole out here.”

He stood and stalked down the short back-hall, pushing open the last door on the right.

It slammed behind him.

Moments later he exited, heading immediately into the washroom. A woman in her early twenties followed as far as the hall. She crept into the office area, a manila folder clasped tightly to her “Pabst Blue Ribbon” t-shirt, her eyes never leaving the carpet.

“Hi,” she said, her face hidden behind her bobbed hair.

Mulligan sighed.

When the proprietor finally returned, the red of his neck had seeped across his face.

The woman hefted the file folder onto the desk and the trio gathered around its splayed contents.

“Look at that view. Look at the quality of that wood. That’s gotta be quite a desk in quite an office – guy getting paid like that shouldn’t be whipping it out on the clock,” Nicole the tech monkey said, brushing aside some errant hair. “Doesn’t help that he sent it from his work address.”

“How could you do this? I gave you a job! I’m your friggin’ Uncle!”

As he shouted, the smut-peddler’s hands continued to throttle a neck that wasn’t there.

“Probably because you didn’t pay her enough,” Mulligan said, stepping between them. “You’ll be paying now though – my client, specifically.”

“Why would I do that? I wasn’t involved in this.”

Mulligan smiled and said, “because-”

Melto hit him in the face.

It was an awkward punch, off balance and poorly planned. Smith rocked back to soften the blow, then returned the favour with an open handed slap. It was always Mulligan’s preferred reponse when exchanging limbs with an amateur: a punch might hurt, but it would also likely anger – a slap brought on only tears.

The bald man began to well up immediately, snot sliding into his beard.

Massaging his jaw, the PI continued:

“Are you aware that ‘The Baroness’ is afraid of being carded while buying smokes? Better yet, are you familiar with the laws of the land regarding the depiction of the genitalia of a minor?”

Mulligan thrust his throbbing hand into his pocket.

“Fire your tech girl and pay Richards from your own wallet. A few folks are going to be by on Monday to double check your employee headcount, and it would be a shame if someone were to feed them a detailed history justifying the fat severance you’re going to be paying the model you had to let go over the weekend.”

Mulligan zipped his hoodie.

Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm. The audio and text formats of Flash Pulp are released under the Canadian Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.

Wouldn’t you like to break up the chain of Ray Parker Jr. songs constantly repeating on your ipod? Just gotten enough of Depeche Mode? My Chemical Romance have you all cried out? Why not subscribe to Flash Pulp on iTunes. Crank your playlist up to eleven.

You can find the feed at Skinner dot fm, or via the itunes’ podcast search.

Flash Pulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age – 400 to 600 words brought to you Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings.

Tonight we rejoin private investigator Mulligan Smith, hot on the trail of the woman alleged to be blackmailing his client.

First though, we’d like to send out a quick note to those who have subscribed via iTunes and joined the Flash Pulp facebook page. Many thanks.

Mulligan found the girl in a trailer park on the outskirts of Capital City.

He’d spent the bottom of his morning in a Starbucks with his laptop, researching “Baroness Ludmilla Anastasia”, and attempting to shield his results from other customers.

There’d been no personal information available, which, given her vocation, the PI had expected. Eventually he’d located a contact number for the company that maintained her website, Melto Productions. After name dropping a police commissioner, he’d eaten his lunch while waiting out the hold music, until, finally, an aggravated man had come on the line and barked out her agent’s phone number.

Mulligan hadn’t bothered to call – the reverse directory gave up the address easily and shortly there-after he’d scooped the keys to the Tercel and snapped shut his notebook.

Twenty-five minutes of driving later, he found himself nosing the baby blue clunker along the uneven pavement of Elm Terrace. As he pulled up to his destination, he noted a rangy twenty-something in red Adidas track pants had stepped to the double-wide’s screen door.

“Yeah?” the man in the bright pants asked.

“Name’s Smith.” Mulligan, weighing his approach, opted to apply some angular momentum to the truth. “I work with the police. I need to speak with your girlfriend.”

He stepped onto the homemade porch. “Immediately.”

It wasn’t the inclusion of the police that the investigator thought of as a gamble, he was on first name terms with most of the uniforms working the east side of the city. The real risk was in assuming the guy was so small time he was living and sleeping with the talent.

Her website had largely featured pencil skirts and crisp-rimmed glasses, so when a teen in a white tank top and sagging grey sweatpants bounced down the iron step and onto the plywood patio, Smith had to take a moment to re-imagine her in work attire.

“HEY BILLY-” Her raspy voice rocketed into the shadows behind the screen. “You wanna go get me some smokes?”

Mulligan momentarily wondered if Billy, no doubt eavesdropping, had any eardrums left.

“The hell, why don’t you go get ’em yourself?”

“You know that douche-canoe counter jockey always cards me.”

There was a pause from within.

“Fine.”

Agent-Boyfriend slammed through the door, across the deck, and into his Honda Civic. After a moment of fighting with the ignition, the hatchback roared away from the cement slab that made up the home’s front yard.

“Now that he’s gone, we can talk,” she said, pulling a cigarette from the elastic depths of her cotton pockets.

Mulligan’s fingers plucked a lighter from his jeans, sparking the flint and applying it to the girl’s dangling addiction.

She continued:

“You’re here about the pictures, right? I’ll tell you straight up that I don’t have them. I don’t want any trouble, and I don’t want to hear any whining about your Wife or Boss either. I can’t help what you did.”

“I’m actually a private dick, here on behalf of a client,” Smith replied.

“Oh, things must be getting serious. You don’t really look like the kind of guy who takes pictures of his junks and mails them to people anyhow.”

“If people are emailing you pictures of, uh, their junks, but you’re not getting them, who is? Your agent?”

“Billy? Hell no, that jackass still uses a pager. A friend of mine got us all set up with the agency, and our site. Maybe it’s old Theo, the guy who owns the whole thing, who’s actually getting the money.”

Mulligan nodded, thanked the girl for being so forthcoming, and turned back to the Tercel.

“Hey,” the girl said. “That was some pretty big help I just handed you – if you manage to find the one running the scam, will you let me know?”

She took a long drag, exhaling through her nose and mouth simultaneously. Her eyes took on some of the hard countenance that was so familiar to her fans.

“I figure I deserve a cut.”

Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm. The audio and text formats of Flash Pulp are released under the Canadian Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.

It was quarter after nine in the morning, and Mulligan was seated at the deep end of an expansive maple dining table.

As he’d staggered up the walk he’d passed two uniformed school children, and once inside he’d found himself sitting across from the remains of their breakfast – rogue mini-wheats and toast crumbs littered the hardwood.

Over the wreckage, a bald toddler glared at him, its round face leaning forward, its eyes tightened into accusatory slits. The stark white walls were windowless and unadorned, making it difficult for the PI to do anything but return his stare.

The woman who’d met him at the door frequently popped in and out of the room, occasionally taking a single dish and dropping a comment from her scattered internal dialogue.

She re-materialized, placing a mug of coffee at Mulligan’s hand.

“He should be down any moment,” she said.

The woman took a long look at the cup.

When the drink had been offered, about twenty minutes previous, Smith had responded to her questioning by letting her know that he generally enjoyed two tips of milk and a pinch of sugar. Now he waited out the pause, opting not to mention his currently uncut beverage.

“Oh.” The woman said, lifting a coaster from the decorative-heap atop the nearby sideboard, and sliding it under his mug.

Nodding, she turned back to the kitchen.

Mulligan cleared his throat.

“Sorry, could I trouble you for a bit of milk and sugar?” he asked.

“Oh. Certainly.”

As she once again began to disappear through the adjoining arch, a series of clicks and thuds drifted down the staircase.

She glanced at the landing, then scuttled from the room.

Perfectly coiffed, Peter Richards, the client, descended the stairs.

Nudging aside the toddler – who seemed no happier to see his father than he’d been to see the PI – Richards pulled out the chair across from Mulligan. There was an awkward moment as the new arrival attempted to find an undampened surface on which to rest his cuffed wrists.

“Good morning,” the businessman in the well cut suit said.

“Good morning,” the investigator in the black hoodie replied.

Reappearing at the doorway, the woman now balanced an overflowing bowl of Cheerios in her right hand, and another cup of black coffee in her left. Taking the measure of the room, she dropped the Cheerios at Smith’s end, the coffee at the other.

“Listen,” Mulligan said, leaning over his bowl. “You look like the kind of fella who packs a lot into a day, and I don’t think my hanging around is doing your wife much good. I got your fax with the contract, let’s just get to the basics of what I’m looking at and we can fill in the details as I need them.”

“Fine.” The suited man set aside the blackberry he’d begun to thumb at.

“It began two weeks ago,” As his client spoke, the PI looked about for something to use in place of his missing cutlery. Amongst the sideboard’s decorative plumage he located an over-sized bit of silver, a gravy ladle, that he found quite effective. “I was involved in an email exchange with a woman who -”

The child across the table had received a revelation: no one was paying him any attention.

“HOOOOOOOO,” he shouted in retaliation.

Casting about the maple, his father located one of the escaped mini-wheats and thrust it into the boy’s mouth.

“As I was saying,” Richards began.

“HOOOOOOOO,” the boy interrupted, wheat mush running down his chin.

Mulligan, having tunneled his way through a patch of the Cheerios, scooped some of the sweet cereal run-off into his mug. Standing, he handed both bowl and ladle to the toddler, who cracked a smile in exchange.

With the room once again silent, the client cleared his throat.

“I had the situation in hand…,” his explanation was interrupted this time by his wife, whom neither man had noticed once again at the doorway. She began to cry hysterically, her birdlike body shaking with the sobs.

“No, I mean…,” he started, but she had already pulled the child free of its prison and run up the mahogany staircase.

The well dressed man stood.

“Look, I need to deal with this. The woman blackmailing us is ‘Baroness Ludmilla Anastasia’, just google it.”

Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm. The audio and text formats of Flash Pulp are released under the Canadian Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.

Ever wondered how a relatively mild-mannered writer might be compelled to join an international group of religious zealots, only to be expelled from a foreign nation after threatening to bomb a major airline?

Find William Shunn’s memoir, ‘The Accidental Terrorist’, and much more, at Shunn.net.

Flash Pulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age – 400 to 600 words brought to you Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Tonight we introduce a new character to the line up, Joe Monk, Emperor Of Space. In this episode we see some of Joe’s humble beginnings, in a time before his ascension to the throne.

Joe Monk was laying tracks across the great big black, and at the heart of his U.S. steel nest, he was rocking out.

Given that his speed approximated that of light, it was difficult to see him coming. Still, before take off many had remarked that the ship looked like nothing so much as an egg balanced atop a Lego brick.

Monk himself was unaware of this – he’d been but an infant at the time of lift off.

His ride was powered by a thousand mile wide force net maintained by computers capable of hundreds of calculations a second. The ship utilized the Sagan effect to cause thrust, dropping tiny universal nuclei in its wake – seeds that immediately burst into Small Bangs. The leading edges of these universes were caught up in the ship’s net, forcing the craft through the emptiness like a rising tide, before they collapsed under the crushing counter pressure of the energy absorbent mesh.

By the age of nineteen he’d grown quite bored with the ship’s catalogue of music – he’d spent too many long evenings crawling the tape library from end to end, even the two hundred hours that must have seemed endless to ground researchers could not sate him.

Still, with no alternative, he often found himself listlessly shuffling the spools just for background noise, until even his beloved Edwinn Starr was wearing thin.

At the age of twenty-two he forced an embargo on himself and re-programmed the music library’s door to lock for six months.

It was two weeks before his twenty-fourth birthday when he finally spotted the typo in the punch card source code, a bug that would leave the door locked not six months, but six years.

So he waited.

Time passed, slowly. He spent more time in the movie room, re-watching Astaire and Rogers’ flicks. He liked them well enough, but he wished the music librarian had talked more with the film librarian, as the two seemed universes apart.

By the time he was twenty-eight he’d fallen heavily into what had been originally intended as the bulk of the ship’s entertainment, the microfilm library. He was wandering the halls, the telescopic end of a portable reader held to one eye, when he heard a thick metallic click.

Setting aside the tale about a lippy detective, he cocked an ear.

He knew the rhythmic hum of the engine, the gentle fuzz of the life support and air conditioners, the tick-tack of the automated help and repair drones that occasionally took a shortcut through his area on their way to the functional portion of the ship – but this sound was wholly new to him.

It did not repeat.

It took him the better part of the afternoon poking around the hallway, in and around the vents, tapping on walls, entering and exiting supply closets and half forgotten spaces – usually full of children’s toys – before he unthinkingly tried the door to the music library.

It popped open at his touch.

The tears of a religious experience began to roll down his cheeks.

He stepped into the room and sank into the leather rolling chair. He hefted the headphones, re-adjusted their size, then pulled the thickly padded ‘O’s over his ears.

His fingers worked from muscle memory, cracking the cannister and lacing up the dual reels.

At a high, brassy volume, Edwinn Starr opined on war, and its worth.

Joe began to rock out.

Unheard over the roar, the computer spoke allowed for the first time in four years, delivering the words its occupant had been waiting to hear for nearly thirty.

“Touch down in t-minus three days, six hours, twelve minutes, forty-one seconds, and counting.”

Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm. The audio and text formats of Flash Pulp are released under the Canadian Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.